Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday June 08, 2009 @03:19PM
from the short-attention-span dept.

The Narrative Fallacy writes "Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads.""

OMG I just got my new blog on blogspot, everyone I know is now reading hilarious stories about my cat. Yesterday, he threw up on my carpet and I spent four or five posts describing the *huck huck huck* noise he started making, the vomit on the carpet, removing the vomit, getting the stain out, you know just things people love to read about! Mr. Freckles was sick but he got better! Oh yes he did! Yesyesyesyes!

*one week later*

Oh, blogpost is so last week. It turns out only about one person was reading it but now you can see Mr. Freckles on Flickr! You can actually see the vomit and the piece of yarn covered in bile that Mr. Freckles produced! And we have pictures of Mr. Freckles at the vet getting his temperature taken! People LOVE IT!

*one week later*

Oh, Flickr isn't as great as Mr. Freckles thought. It turns out only about one person was looking at Mr. Freckles but that doesn't matter because I just figured out how to get my own podcast! Now people can hear my awesome squeaky super opinionated voice explain how cuddly wuddly my cat is! Who's more cuddly than Mr. Freckles? Nobody, that's who! Listen to Mr. Freckles complain about his ear infection!

*one week later*

I guess those five podcast downloads were really just me if you count my laptop/desktop/work computer/iPod/iPhone but that doesn't matter, Mr. Freckles is a movie star! We have our own YouTube channel and we get over 100 views a week! Mr. Freckles is friends with Play Him Off Cat too! We just wish they weren't from the same bad egg posting that "nobody wants to watch your fucking cat!" Well, I know the world loves Mr. Freckles almost as much as I do and you're going to hear about him. No matter where you live or what you do, I'm going to leave a bunch of accounts that are nothing but shells like a trail of used condoms behind a frat boy. And if you post painful anti-Mr. Freckles posts about me and Mr. Freckles, I shall only redouble my efforts. I will not stop until I find a way to bring Mr. Freckles' love to you!

I'm trying very hard to imagine something more annoying than twitter and it's making my head hurt. I can only picture a guy actually following me around all day, tapping me on the shoulder and saying "Hey, hey, hey--pay attention to me!" 24-hours-a-day.

When you think about it, the telephone is just about the rudest technological device that exists. As Stephen Fry once said, "it's like someone standing behind you yelling 'speak to me, speak to me' over and over again until you pick up".

You actually hit it right on the head. The next thing is personal, targeted messaging to deliver ads. That "guy" will be your phone, and it's going to remind you of all the opportunities to spend money that are in close proximity to you. I'm sure some doughnut chain will lock down the use of Homer Simpson saying "Doughnuts, ahhwggrrrdroollll." And every fast food place will be bombarding you with their jingle. Then advertisers will find a way to justify sending blanket text messages in a given radius (perha

The good thing about Twitter is that you choose who to listen to. So if there's a guy (virtually) tapping on your shoulder 20 hours a day saying nothing better than "Hey, hey, hey--pay attention to me", you just say "unfollow" and he goes away for good. (You could just not follow him in the first place also, but sometimes you follow someone and they wind up more annoying than useful.) That's what I like about Twitter - the ability to easily tune out the junk and tune in the good stuff. (Yes, there *are*

Well, during the week and a half when everyone else is on Twitter, it *is* quite annoying. Waiting for trends to die out is usually tiresome, especially if you don't participate. But by the time the airhead gossip shows are all talking about who's twittering who, you know it won't be much longer.

You have to take this report with a grain of salt, though. A lot of people set up blogs just to see what the fuss was all about, and probably did nothing with them. Similarly, I just read an article that said that the majority of Twitter accounts only have one post. I wouldn't consider a blog or a Twitter account with less than, say, a dozen postings, to be abandoned, since the authors weren't serious about them in the first place.

Over seven million blogs still active is a healthy number. I'd like to hear a

They won't... because hate them all you want they serve purpose. I don't understand all the hate for twitter, in fact I bet if the name was something else no one would have a problem with it. It fills an odd niche between email list and IM. Its a medium.. nothing more nothing less. Social networking sites well they keep people in touch. Your blog on what your dog ate? meh. no one cares.

I can tell you, at least, why it appeals to people of a certain political persuasion that will remain nameless: They can make short assertions that can not be challenged, plus it's easy to ignore anyone who disagrees with you. It lets them feel like their in a big tough gang without ever having to go out in public. All this while allowing them to believe that they're on the "cutting edge".

You think I'm kidding? check out the tag "#tcot".

Which reminds me of outgoing Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman (R), who last week stated that the "Key to Republican success lies in the ethernet". Twitter is made for a guy like him.

Social networking allows people to find each other to have sex, but is more customizable and doesn't have the overt nature of a dating site or a personal ad, which encourages women to use it. The first question on the mind of anyone thinking of creating or investing in a new social networking venture should be "How easy will this make it for people to find partners, without making it LOOK like they're really looking for sex?" The last point is critical in that if it is too overt, women won't use it, and th

So THAT'S why IRC and Usenet haven't caught on among the masses! If we can find some way to integrate free and open source software with free and open source sex, it truly will be the year of the Linux desktop!

Well, that's the thing. Not the subject matter, but the quality of the writing itself. A good writer can keep your interest in a story about mowing the lawn, while a bad writer can make a murder boring.

I've had my own site since last millenium, primarily as a way to journal my family's life for myself and people in my extended family. It's been a great communication tool to keep up with everyone, and a huge time saver when it comes to sending individual e-mails to everyone.

It's also been a great historical record of when things happened. I'm embarrassed to say that I've checked my blog more than once to make sure I remembered my daughter's birthday right.

It was also a great way for everyone to stay in touch on 9/11. Two of my family were flying that day, and it was a central place where everyone could post their flight delays and locations.

The thing I like about blogs is I always looked at them as a semi-anonymous public diary. I don't read them, but I did a project for about a year where I posted my thoughts, uncertainty and insecurity on my own sexuality. Some of the things I'm less proud of and a lot of the kinds of things I might not have shared with anyone. I tried to keep it as honest as I could and avoided being titillating or self-serving as well as I could.

The responses I got were mostly positive and intelligent and the whole thing

Here here. I don't blog, because it has never interested me. I don't use social networking sites either, seeing as most of my friends don't. But I don't see them as inherently bad if they're used right.

If you treat a blog as just something for your friends and family, or as essentially a non-private diary, that's fine. If you're using a blog as a get-rich-quick scheme or are just whoring for attention, it's not fine; but then you're probably an obnoxious pillock in everything else you do too, so that isn't really the blog's fault.

If you treat a social networking site as just a way of communicating with variable groups of people (and that's something Facebook can do better than phone calls or emails), that's fine. If you're using it to install 300 apps about turning people into zombies, or stalking your friends/girlfriends/relatives, it's not fine; but then you're probably not someone I'd like in real life either, so you can't blame the website for that.

I'm still trying to figure out a legitimate use for Twitter though. Twitter seems to be up there with herpes as something desirable and fun to try with my friends.

The dream is not dead, there never was one.. But what there is is a public, searchable record of things that people who have "abandoned" their blogs have magnanimously left online for all to search and see. As a system administrator, searching what Quenqua or Technorati deem abandoned has saved my ass more than a few times. Seems like a typical perspective on blogging that has been clouded by a few years of some major bloggers gaining commercial success. If you aren't a sell out, you aren't a blogger. No small timer's allowed. Come on, we don't all blog to get rich and famous, and I guess if that isn't in keeping with Technorati's business model (whatever that is) then bloggers are all failures in their eyes. I for one will keep searching and using blogs, however (in)frequently they might be updated.

I tried to keep a blog once, but I honestly had nothing interesting to say. Most the time it was just my idle thoughts, and even _I_ didn't care to read them having just thought them. What few blogs I do read tend to be research or tech blogs. Apparently the millions of monkeys at millions of keyboards do get bored eventually.

It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place. These are the same people who think I need to be updated every few seconds with a tweet detailing every single piece of inconsequential minutia from their lives.

It's the same at work. I keep a log of what I do throughout the day and every week I update a database. Management asked for a weekly status report so I whipped up a php script that formats the weekly output into the form they expect to see. So I just copy and paste it into an e-mail and send it off.

It's been a great help, especially at the end of the year when they want justification to give you a 3% raise. Organize it into projects, summarise them, throw in a few highlights and they're very happy.

I've been told several times that I provide twice as much detail as anyone else in his group (he manages three groups of which, I'm a member of one of them).

Part of the reason though is that I was a consultant for many years. I also spent a couple of years telecommuting. So keeping detailed information on what I did kept them aware that I was a valuable member of the team.

....that is, those autogenerated blogs on free sites that just contain a mishmash of keywords - or a bunch of stolen content. Those lie fallow because there's no real blogger behind them.

I used to blog technical stuff once or twice a week... now I twitter the little stuff and save blog entries for something more involved, like using setrlimit on Mac OS X [blogs.com]. Hard to boil that down to 140 characters... unless it's "setrlimit apparently not working, but the server's running Linux, so, meh".

It seems the ideas behind twitter, facebook, and blogs are "my thoughts are so important that I'm almost obligated to allow everyone else to read them." Or in twitter's case, "my stream of consciousness is so important [or insert "funny," "witty," "cool," or whatever]..."

In my experience, while listening to people is definitely a Good Thing, I don't need to listen or read your every thought. For the most part, it gets fairly predictable after a few blog posts. And, frankly, for the most part, I don't really care. I don't care what someone's dog ate:)

The idea that my thoughts really SHOULD be read by other people seems to be an egotistical way to go about your life. And, incidentally, if most people have that attitude - which I think most do, it seems to be human nature to overinflate one's importance in one's own view - then reading other people's blogs won't be very consistent...

And of course, I'm posting this on slashdot because this comment is important and everyone should read it....:P

I had a blog through college. It wasn't anything special, just my thoughts at various junctures.

If someone finds it and gets something out what I read, cool.If someone finds it and thinks it's a waste of space, also cool.If nobody finds it but me a ways down the road and I get to re-live my memories, cool.The only thing that would suck if nobody, including me, ever finds it again. That's unlikely. In a few years I'm certain to check it out again.

The people who have nothing to say are all on Facebook now. The remaining blogs are typically either from people who are serious writers, or those who simply need a place to post operational info like software updates.

This is what I came here to say. I used to blog, mostly as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family that we aren't physically near. Some of them reciprocated with their own blogs.

Now, everyone that I used to interact with is on Facebook, so that's where I (and they) post. In addition, many of the blogs I might have followed (e.g. celebrities, causes, technology, entertainment) are now on Facebook as well.

It's not that blogs have gone away, it's that they and their audiences have transitioned to social networking.

When the "next big thing" comes along - like Google Wave - people will be lamenting that social networking has gone away. Change happens, and communications improves. It doesn't go away, it gets better.

This isn't really true. The parenting-blogosphere is alive and well. I think it is because parents find it helpful to have a place to share their impressions of parenthood, stories about their kids, and other random things. People self-select into little communities based on their parenting styles, their kids' traits, and other things, but not necessarily geography. I have "friends" who live on the other side of the country or even in different countries. We may never meet, but we have enough in common that

I've never heard of these particular youtubers. Sounds pretty funny actually (smoking man and sitting girl). Do you have some links to those two?

There are some interesting things that occasionally catch my attention on YouTube. Some tubers are using the video and reply features to generate discussion and hold debates on hot topics. Granted, the interface is clumsy for that use, but encouraging young people to debate with people with differing viewpoints from all around the world is a good thing.

During my time in college I was required to make one in at least 8 classes, I suppose I could have argued and said I already had one but when it came down to it, I didn't care so I just did a new one. Hell those assignment were basically free points but I don't think I ever got full marks on them.

According to a recent survey, 0 editions of the NY Times have been updated in the last 120 days, meaning that 100 percent have essentially been abandoned, left to lie fallow in landfills, recycling plants and at the bottom of bird cages.

some people post less often than 120 days. I started mine to let my family know how I was doing in Iraq and posted once in a while to let them know I was OK. Now I post various updates to my life, book reviews, or anything else I feel like. Surprisingly, some people in my and my wife's family actively read and await the next post. I have a friend who sometimes posts less often than 120 days, but I wouldn't call his abandoned either.

The power of modern search engines makes all those dormant blogs searchable for obscure bits of data. Many is the time I've had a question about some ridiculously obscure thing and I can find an answer (or at least a lead) in an old blog somewhere that the person long since forgot.

I usually blog about technical things that I think might help people out. I don't care if I'm famous, and I leave personal stuff to Facebook where friends and family that might care can read it.

My blog gets about 50-75 hits a day, all from search engines searching for items I write about. Of course they aren't going to come back and read me every day, and that's not why I write it. I do it mainly to give back a little, since I've been helped so often from googling (er, I mean blinging) for info whenever I get into a jam.

And I'm not even going to link to my blog from here just to prove I'm not an attention whore!

Maybe he's doing it wrong. My site http://www.geekazon.com/ [geekazon.com] which mostly documents a big home renovation project, consistently brings in about $30/month from Google ads. Pays for my DSL line it does. I started the site mainly to keep distant relatives informed about the remodel. I have only updated it a few times in the past 5 years and have done nothing to promote it, but it's usually the top Google result for "lifting a house".

My site stats are crap, but there is a small audience. It's about the love more than anything though. As well a way to keep those who care in touch. Yes my ads have earned me a whole zero dollars but I sill hold out hope:-) and Amazon integrates well with my blog anyways.

Let's face it. Only a handful pursue with tenacity the desire to regularly inform the world of what they're thinking about or what they are doing. A fraction of these actually have something interesting to say.

Blogging will go down the route of 27 MHz CB radios. Nice to have tried it but most information you think interests the world just doesn't.

...blogging was a fad. The truly first wave blogs have probably been dead for two years now already; and the blog was also probably more needed during the Bush administration, (as a form of indie media) than it is now.

For a long time, the information on the web was put there magically by the techocracy that architected it. For non-tech users, getting their information online has been through ever-easier methods of publishing. Web-logging, aka blogging, was just another step in this phase.

The motivation for providing content varies, but psychologists would say that part of it is in the feeling of belonging with peers you identify with. From forum posts, Wikipedia editing, Amazon reviews, posting youtube vids of kittens in sinks, etc - there's a clic for everyone. These are new-found "friends" that people interact with by simply making something appear online.

There's also a compelling push to do what the longstanding "professional" journalism has done for years. So, there's a group that pushes to create look-alike content that fills a niche, but do it online and for free (except for ads). We get "independent" media outlets, political commentary, diy comedy routines, and websites covering local issues. Quality and regularity varies.

All of these things are good - it pushes the body of human knowledge and interaction into a universal format. The transmission (physical wires) and delivery styles might leave something to be desired, but it's in a fairly searchable format as uncontextual text (that context part is still a challenge, all you search engines out there).

I look forward to the slow spread of not just content, but the focus on a universal context system that gets us a more semantic web. Also, we might also get live connections directly to 1 or more senses in real time, someday. Putting these together and you pretty much get an augmented reality stream, completely customizable, so that you won't have to remember so much as be able to process the extra info fast enough. That'll probably hit an upper limit on our brainpower, but we always seem willing to try (driving while using phone and more). After that, jumping over the senses to just filling artificial neurons with the info, accessible by our natural ones, will be the challenge.

That'll probably hit an upper limit on our brainpower, but we always seem willing to try (driving while using phone and more).

Driving while using a phone seems to redline brain power for most people -- to the point that they can't even process the fact that they are impaired. To the point, in fact, that reading and writing on a tiny device while driving seems like reasonable idea.

So much for that.

Quasi-quote from the TV sitcom Becker, "Reality TV is the petri dish where America grows its idiots". That was a crack on the first season of Survivor, and it has been more than vindicated by the way that reality TV has pushed the body

Most people's blogs suck for the simple reason that they have no content.

A blog is only interesting if you can post info that others would not have been able to find on their own, and that they would want to find. Most blogs fail on both counts, so they only post short commentaries and links--links that often only lead to posts in other people's blogs, instead of straight to the content that is the subject of the discussion.

{-blogs do work well for posting personal information and stories for family and friends to read; that is a realistic use--but then, the target audience is only a few closely-related people-}

Now if Google would just introduce an "ignore blog results" option, the dreck of this part of the internet would finally get the attention it truly deserves.
~

I think one reason many blogs fail is because the blogger didn't set up a posting schedule beforehand. Many blogs that I like to read promise they will put up a new post every Sunday, or every M-W-F or whatever works for them. I like it because I know when to look for new posts and also because it shows commitment on the blogger's part to the blog.

First, some blogs simply exist as part of spam and SEO objects. Furthermore, there are many specialized blogs out there that only update rarely because their specialties only require infrequent updates or have to do with topics that have bursts of news and then very little. (See for example http://presidentialdebateblog.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] (disclaimer: one of the people who runs that is my twin).

In any event, humans go through many different things on a temporary basis. Would one have made a big deal in 1938 or so when there would have been more cars disposed of than currently functioning as evidence that cars are going out of style? This really doesn't tell us anything useful by itself.

Who would've thought that??... besides Theodore Sturgeon and everybody who heard of his law.

(Reminds me of the classical music program host at UofMichigan's official radio station, decades ago, declaring the death of rock-n-roll because only something like 10% of all rock songs were new compositions that year - some decades into the rock music era. Was sorely tempted to call him up and demand he also declare the death of classical music, since 0% were new compositions. B-) )